Foreign Affairs MagazineDons a New Cap

The person who says it cannot be done should not interrupt the person doing it.

—Chinese proverb

When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

—Jonathan Swift, “Thoughts on Various Subjects, Moral and Diverting”

Jan. 1—Robert Ingraham’s article appearing in this issue takes up the matter of how British intelligence, particularly under the auspices of what is called, in intelligence parlance, “cultural diplomacy” has sought to undermine the practice, tradition and memory of American foreign policy as expressed by Presidents Washington, John Quincy Adams, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy.

A precautionary note to the reader, however, is in order. The primary distinction of this publication, and of the political activity of those associated with the physical economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, is that for 45 years, LaRouche and his associates have stood, despite threats, ridicule and indifference, against the British Empire, or “the Anglo-Dutch Empire, descendant of Venice” to be more precise.

We have stood especially against what Winston Churchill infamously described as “the empire of the mind”—British empiricism in its various forms, especially in the realm of what are mistakenly divided as “science” and “art.” Against this, LaRouche since 1977 has emphasized the American Revolution’s Alexander Hamilton, and the unique American intelligence service and pre-government created by scientist Benjamin Franklin, himself a protégé of the earlier Massachusetts Bay Colony’s sovereign republic, suppressed in 1690, the year of the birth of Franklin’s literary creation, “Poor Richard.”

Therefore, after more than four decades of nearly daily campaigning against—and discussion of—the moral inferiority of British-imperial liberal democracy to the republican tradition of the United States, Executive Intelligence Review can state that it has kept faith with “Poor Richard.” Therefore, if you think that the last half-century of British manipulation of United States policy has been an act of evil genius, or a “grand deception,” think again. In truth, the perpetrators have also been a victim of their own designs. Decade by decade, British-inspired cultural decadence has compromised the intelligence of the very authors of the “permanent British empire” hoax, who were never too Swift to begin with.

Lackeys Lacking Literacy?

Once upon a time, those who wrote for Foreign Affairs, the journal of record for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), had at least a self-credible pretense of literacy, if not intellectual depth. It may not have been shared by all of their readers, but their analysis, as presented, was at least a statement consistent with the interests of the trans-Atlantic Anglo-American, “liberal-imperial” alliance that they purported to competently represent. If, however, we briefly review an article, originally published in the May/June 2018 issue of Foreign Affairs, entitled “The End of the Democratic Century,” and subtitled “Autocracy’s Global Ascendance,” we find something alarming, though lawful. Omissions of fact with respect to matters as elementary as the true American form of government, something much heard on Presidential election night in 2016, have now become acceptable in the pages of Foreign Affairs.

Perhaps there is another explanation. Certain, presumably younger, Foreign Affairs writers may be suffering from the effect of congenital ideological in-breeding, leading them to write stupidities which should have been obvious to their editorial board, and summarily rejected in order to protect the guilty from indictment. In former times, an eighth-grade civics class would have prevented any literate writer from stating, in the very opening paragraph, the following:

By the turn of the millennium, [the United States’] position as the most powerful and influential state in the world appeared unimpeachable. As a result, the twentieth century was marked by the dominance not just of a particular country but also of the political system it helped spread: liberal democracy.

Regardless of the propagandistic or ideological intent of the piece, literate writers would never have blundered so blatantly. The United States is a Constitutional republic. Its electoral processes are those of a republic, not a democracy—which is why the United States, for example, has, and should have, an Electoral College.

Even if the intent of this entire article is to misinform, or to propagandize on behalf of “liberal imperial democracy”—to, for example, divert readers from the realization that the United States, in the name of “Project Democracy,” has fought a series of unlawful and unjust wars, including against nations that never attacked it, and that, under the control of a British imperial design, the United States was exporting a practice and form of government contrary to its own self-interest—even if the article is intended to twist the truth, literacy demands that it at least state the truth. The Foreign Affairs article’s opening is illiterate, and this illiteracy expresses a qualitative degree of mental collapse of the trans-Atlantic “knights of the Round Table.”

This is not the first time in recent years that a justified concern that the dumbing down of the formerly-literate trans-Atlantic bureaucratic and administrative elites is an increasing national security risk, has been brought to the attention of writers and contributors to this magazine.

A person formerly associated with a foreign intelligence agency, now a permanent resident in the United States, reported five years ago that over the previous 25 years, a secular decline in the intelligence of Israeli, American and British interlocutors, had been noticed. These were people with whom this individual was required to interact in order to convey sensitive evaluations intended to affect policy on the part of several nuclear weapons-capable nations. The importance of maintaining certain standards of historical and political literacy including among one’s adversaries, becomes even clearer when considering only one of many foolish conclusions recorded in “The End of the Democratic Century”:

In the span of a quarter century, liberal democracies have gone from a position of unprecedented economic strength to a position of unprecedented economic weakness. . . . So the future promises two realistic scenarios: either some of the most powerful autocratic countries in the world will transition to liberal democracy, or the period of democratic dominance that was expected to last forever will prove no more than an interlude before a new era of struggle between mutually hostile political systems.

Not only does the latter conclusion not necessarily follow from the former accurate statement of fact—neither of the asserted “realistic scenarios” is realistic at all. Neither is thinkable in a post-“hypersonic weapons” world. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s March 1, 2018 national address, and China’s pre-eminence as the world’s leading physical economy, make both “realistic scenarios” untenable, as anyone thinking about these well-documented strategic areas would know.

The Takeaway from the Giveaway

The giveaway to the underlying pathology under scrutiny here, is indicated by the article’s passage, “the period of democratic dominance that was expected to last forever.” That is actually stated without a trace of irony. Apparently, the authors are incapable of, or unconcerned with counting back twenty-five years to the 1990s, and asking the question, “Is it possible that what was done at the time by our trans-Atlantic alliance was utterly stupid?”

EIRNS/Stuart Lewis

George H.W. Bush, in 1988.

This brings us briefly to reference the Presidency of the recently officially-deceased George Bush 41. Though former CIA head George Bush’s Presidency was one that was, as Edgar Poe called it, “the soul of crime,” the incarceration of Lyndon LaRouche, and the rejection of the policy initiatives he offered the United States from his jail cell in Rochester Minnesota, was the Bush crime that had the most long-standing consequences for the United States. (By this crime, the United States was shrunk, and the minds of the citizens were shrunk.)

The notion that a Thatcher-Bush-Mitterrand liberal democratic “New World Order” that cannibalized the former Soviet Union, that prevented the consolidation of Germany as a major industrial power, as well as launched wars in Panama and Iraq, and escalated internal war in the United States through the crack-cocaine epidemic—that such a “New World Order” should be permanent, as asserted by the Foreign Affairs writers, identifies an utterly moronic view of history.

The pathology under discussion here is the secular religious belief in the permanence of British thought (empiricism), British economy (monetarism) and the British Empire (liberal democracy). But the pathology is embedded in the “cultural DNA” of the CFR itself.

Cecil Rhodes’ 1891 founding of the British Round Table Group created the mother body of the Council on Foreign Relations, for which Foreign Affairs magazine is the house organ. To fully grasp the continuing delusions motivating the CFR crowd, it is always worth referring to Rhodes’ last will and testament, establishing the Rhodes Scholarships, in which he states the fantastic design for the “extension of British rule throughout the world . . . the ultimate recovery of United States of America as an integral part of the British Empire, consolidation of the whole empire . . . and finally the foundation of so great a power as to here after render wars impossible and promote the best interest of Humanity.”

After the departure of Ronald Reagan from the White House, this “Rhodesian” perspective surfaced with the post-1989 neocon military strategy, adopted after the November 9 fall of the Berlin Wall, by what was called the “5/20” committee, including then Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz, et al., under “Sir George” Bush 41, and the perpetuation and expansion of that policy under the twin Bush 43/Obama Iraq/Afghanistan wars. Later Obama’s “Tuesday Kill Parties” and Libya war, were further implementations of the same Rhodes strategy. Tony Blair was merely the “Fool Britannia” version of that Rhodesian outlook, as Libya’s Qaddafi was to learn the hard way.

C-SPAN

Former President Barack Obama delivering Mandela Lecture in Johannesburg, South Africa, on July 27, 2018.

The 1990s idea of the United States, and its ally Great Britain, acting as the world’s military hegemon, once expressed in the neo-cons’ “Project for a New American Century,” has now been relegated to the dustbin of history, thanks to recent Russian military breakthroughs. Barack Obama’s post-2016 post-Presidential junkets, including his recent deployment to the African continent against the New Silk Road policy of China and Russia, especially on the issue of advanced technology transfer, including nuclear reactor capabilities, is a particularly ugly expression of the persistence of Rhodes’ “liberal-democratic imperialist” outlook.

Francisco José de Goya’s Caprichos, No. 39: “And So Was His Grandfather.”

The Grins of the Fathers

In one of his Los Caprichos engravings series, the painter Francisco Goya sketches a picture of a donkey in a suit, who displays proudly to the viewer a book showing eight different pairings of his donkey-lineage. The caption? “Asta su Abuelo” (And So Was his Grandfather). The current generation of Foreign Affairs writers is not alone in its British-inspired, intellectually-challenged transgressions. Idiocy can be congenital. Forty years ago, EIR attempted to warn even the CFR members about the leaky mental condition of their “Ship of Fools.” An article from our archives forecasted this current state of Affairs. Notably, it also accurately forecasted what would turn out to be the state of the 2019 Democratic Party, as well as the American party system and trans-Atlantic politics as a whole:

For four-odd years, beginning in mid-1975, an unusual ferment of activities has been dominating New York’s Harold Pratt House, the Council on Foreign Relations’ elegant offices at 58 E. 68th St. A group of over 300 public personalities met frequently, held seminars, presented reports, analyzed computer print outs, exchanged correspondence, led special study groups, stayed up late in mahogany lined libraries, and spun out plots between cigars and brandy. As a result of this activity, countless policy memos, strategic projections, implementation papers, etc. were written and passed hands.

In January 1977, upon the inauguration of President Carter, a rupture occurred in this distinguished group’s activities. All its leaders transferred to Washington, D.C. to become cabinet members of the Carter administration. . . . After the departure of the project leaders to Washington, the group’s work shifted gear and went into the write-up and public relations phase: the policy formulations and strategic concepts which had already been agreed upon were now distributed among various academics who were instructed to put them in writing and some presentable, sugar-coated form. By late last year this phase was concluded and the manuscripts were taken to the publishers. As Project 1980s is winding down, McGraw-Hill is currently putting into circulation 30-odd volumes of policy essays. . . .

DoD/Johancharles Van Boers

U.S. Army soldiers conducting house-to-house searches in Samara, Iraq, on Oct. 1, 2004.

But the CFR crowd had a problem—though it has the power to install its people in positions of public authority and power, although it can dominate the composition of every administration since the assassination of President McKinley, it does not possess ideas that would be sufficiently powerful to win over and motivate people. The CFR is stupid.

In fact, the element of stupidity in the CFR conspiracy is critical; it is in fact so critical that under appropriate circumstances in political analysis, one must justifiably assume that the presence of stupidity, ipso facto, constitutes sufficient evidence to prove the presence of conspiracy. [emphasis added]

Why would rampant stupidity in government be evidence of conspiracy? The cited EIR article went on to report that many in the 1970s objected to the idea that the self-destructive policies of that period—deregulation of the trucking industry, “controlled disintegration” of the world economy, allowing the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank (HSBC), the notorious drug money laundering bank, to take over Marine Midland Bank of New York, turning away from nuclear technology—that these policies were the work of any form of conspiracy. Like today’s opposition to Russia, China, and any obviously positive actions of the Trump Presidency, the policies were seen more as expressions of political difference, ideological blindness, and perhaps abject stupidity, rather than anything intentional. EIR’s unidentified writer explained:

The point is this: if one observes that every single position of power in the United States government is held by a stupid person, one must ineluctably conclude that only a powerful conspiracy could arrange to have all these idiots in power at the same time. The uniform dominance of stupidity in government proves the existence of conspiracy because idiots do not have the intellectual resources to propel themselves to positions of power.

White House/Shealah Craighead

President Donald Trump addressing U.S. Troops at the Al-Asad Airbase in Iraq on Dec. 26, 2018.

Axioms are hereditary, but stupidly does not have to be. That is what the Declaration of Independence promises citizens for the first time in all of history. The “conspiracy of morons” that today is being dismissed from Washington, in a colorful way, largely through the personal initiative of President Donald Trump, means there is less chaos now in Washington, not more. (It may be painful to face, but, yes, it really was that bad.)

The confederacy of dunces, however, was not successful in stopping Lyndon LaRouche. It need not be successful in stopping this Presidency from asserting the national interests of the United States in a new international community of principle. That community, on the frontier of space science, can rediscover Alexander Hamilton in the guise of an advanced, even extra-terrestrial physical economy, as LaRouche has defined it. Jonathan Swift was right.